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To Let by John Galsworthy #ABookADayInMay No.22

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Super quick post tonight, because it’s late. In fact, let’s do it in bullet points.

  • I read To Let by John Galsworthy, originally published in 1921
  • (In fact, I listened to the audiobook – which was good, though it kept repeating lines of dialogue that I assume were meant to be edited out)
  • It’s the third of the Forsyte Saga
  • The first was published in 1906, but then Galsworthy went on a bit of a role – with one in 1920 and another in 1921
  • I read the first one a few years ago, for Tea or Books?, and then the middle one towards the end of last year
  • To Let really relies on you remembering what happened in book 1 – the doomed, cruel marriage of Irene and Soames
  • To Let is chiefly concerned with the next generation – particularly the love that blooms between Irene’s son and Soames’s daughter from their subsequent marriages
  • (But these two – Fleur and Jon – don’t know the other exists. They don’t even know that their parents used to be married.)
  • Fleur has a much more eligible, but profoundly dull, suitor
  • It’s a classic Romeo and Juliet sort of pairing, but if Romeo and Juliet don’t know why they aren’t a perfect match in the eyes of their families
  • Galsworthy is just very good, isn’t he? There’s a reason he was such a staple in the Edwardian era
  • It became fashionable to despise him in the mid-century, particularly if you were someone like George Orwell (who described bad books as ‘Galsworthy-and-water’)
  • But he really gets families, regrets, secrets, sacrifice, stubborness
  • He even makes reading about young, selfish people falling love bearable, and that’s impressive in my eyes
  • To Let has such a brilliant final line – you *almost* feel sorry for a character you’ve spent three books loathing
  • I am amazed that the three books of the first trilogy of the Forsyte Saga are so distinct, and each cover a distinct and intense theme, and yet work together masterfully as a series. Bravo, John.
  • Will I ever read the (gulp) six books in the Forsyte Chronicles? Does anyone? Perhaps in the next six decades.

Amaryllis Night and Day by Russell Hoban #ABookADayInMay No.21

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In case anybody is counting – yes, I did read No.20 in A Book A Day in May and didn’t blog about it. The book I read is Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott, and it’s one of the books in the next episode of Tea or Books?, so I thought I’d wait until then to reveal my thoughts.

And onto today’s book. When I saw Annabel reviewing Russell Hoban’s Kleinzeit the other day, it reminded me that I have a couple of his books to read and they’re quite short. Previously I’ve only read Turtle Diary, which I think is his most famous novel, and… well, Amaryllis Night and Day (2001) is very different.

Peter is an artist who first encounters Amaryllis at a distance in a dream. She is getting on a bus – the bus stop, mysteriously, says BALSAMIC and the bus says FINSEY-OBAY, a place he has never heard of. And the bus is made of bamboo and rice paper in yellows, oranges, and pinks, a bit like a Japanese lantern.

He is beguiled by her (and, yes, it’s the first of Russell Hoban being very Male Author Writing About Women’s Bodies, which did get a bit tiresome). But he has seemingly unrelated dreams and cannot recapture the strange scene – and then, at an exhibition, he meets Amaryllis in person.

When I turned again I saw my reflection, as before, in the glass of the case and fragmentarily repeated in the Klein bottles. Then another face appeared beside mine. I spun around and there she was, dressed the same as in the dream, watching me thoughtfully. She was better-looking than I remembered and not really all that thin. Her dream self might have been painted by Edvard Munch on one of his less cheerful days but the real woman was quite different. Her hair was darker than in the dream; she was still pale but her paleness was that of the Pre-Raphaelite nymphs done by John William Waterhouse; like them she had an exquisite figure, delicately chiselled features, big innocent eyes, and a look of sadness and regret, as if she knew she’d be big trouble but was sorry about it. Astonishing, really, how she was so recognisably herself and yet so unlike her dream self.

I like how Peter, as an artist, sees the world through art references – and not in too forced a way. The Klein bottle, incidentally, is some sort of riff on a mobius strip in which a bottle is eternal surface, or something. I have to admit that I glazed over a little on those bits, complete with diagrams, but other readers will enjoy them.

Peter and Amaryllis have a drink and they want to see each other again – but in the dreamscape. He doesn’t know where she lives or even her last name, so has to rely on this hoped reunion. And… yes, they meet there again.

As their lives continue in dreams (which they call ‘glims’, because saying the word ‘dream’ will force them to awake) and in reality, they take part in a curious experiment. Amaryllis is keen that Peter gets on the bus with her, in the dream, though neither of them seem to know exactly why. And Peter is keen to love Amaryllis forever? I wasn’t sure how the insta-love played into the structure, but Amaryllis is clearly captivating.

The novel continues, with dream and reality becoming more and more aligned. Incidents that happen in dream seem to come true; experiences aren’t clearly dream or reality. The prose remains quite spare and straightforward, which I think is wise. We know where we are within the sentences, even if not within the scenes.

At that time of day I always have the feeling that if you gave reality a good kick the scenery would shake.

I did like Amaryllis Night and Day, though nowhere near as much as I enjoyed Turtle Diary. I think that’s partly because I didn’t much care about either Peter or Amaryllis. Rather, the way Hoban constructed realities was interesting – not necessarily what happened within them. And I did find his erotic gaze a little tedious. He was in his mid-70s when he wrote it, and there’s something a little boring and sad, to me, about old men writing droolingly about 20-something women’s bodies.

So, an interesting experiment that I think deserved more worthy content. But keeping up with my May challenge featuring very different books most days!

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka #ABookADayInMay No.19

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The Buddha in the Attic: Julie Otsuka: Amazon.co.uk: Otsuka, Julie: 9780241956489: Books

I think I picked up The Buddha in the Attic (2011) at a day that Penguin ran for book bloggers back in 2013 and it has survived numerous culls of my shelves since then on account of its brevity. It’s only 129 pages, I thought. It doesn’t take up much room on the shelf, and surely I’ll manage to read it one day. Ten years later, that day has come!

The Buddha in the Attic is a historical novel about a time between the World Wars where Japanese women would be shipped from Japan to America to meet with their husbands. Not people they had married back in Japan, but new husbands – Japanese men who had already emigrated; people they had exchanged letters and photographs with, each side selling their end of the bargain. The man would make promises about economic opportunities; the woman would talk about her capabilities and beauty. The photos, they learned, were often old or even of other people. The letters were written by other people, filled with lies.

In the first chapter we are aboard the boat, and the opening paragraph shows the technique that Otsuka uses that makes this novella so unusual and, to my mind, so successful.

On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years-faded hand-me-downs from our sisters that had been patched and redyed many times. Some of us came from the mountains, and had never before seen the sea, except for in pictures, and some of us were the daughters of fishermen who had been around the sea all our lives. Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to the sea, or a fiancé, or perhaps someone we loved had jumped into the water one unhappy morning and simply swum away, and now it was time for us, too, to move on.

Throughout the book, the pronoun is always ‘we’. Even if the incidents are clearly individual and unique, the narrator will say either ‘we’, ‘some of us’, or, occasionally, ‘one of us’. There are sections that go through so many different scenarios with a lilting, poetic repetition.

Home was a cot in one of their bunkhouses at the Fair Ranch in Yolo. Home was a long tent beneath a leafy plum tree at Kettleman’s. Home was a wooden shanty in Camp No. 7 on the Barnhart Tract out in Lodi. Nothing but rows of onions as far as the eyes can see. Home was a bed of straw in John Lyman’s barn alongside his prize horses and cows. Home was a corner of the washhouse at Stockton’s Cannery Ranch. Home was a bunk in a rusty boxcar in Lompoc. Home was an old chicken coop in Willows that the Chinese had lived in before us.

And so on and so on. Otsuka’s aim is to give the reader a whole sweep of experience – a whole generation of these young Japanese women. They mostly suffer hardship, whether that be thankless jobs, violent husbands, racism from white Americans, or simply a sense of hopelessness. At no point does an individual emerge as the heroine – rather, the heroine is the whole group. It is an intriguingly collectivist point of view, where almost every novel is an exercise in individualism. What an ambitious undertaking and, to my mind, it works really well.

I had to reconsider what I expected from a fictional narrative. Almost nobody is named, and there is no arc of individual narrative, and so I had to embrace a structure made of infinite variety. And somehow it is still compelling. I’m not sure it would have worked over a much longer book, but at novella-length it is a real success.

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud #ABookADayInMay No.18

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I knew Noreen Masud a bit when our paths overlapped in Oxford, and we’ve stayed in touch on social media, so I was really interested when I saw she’d published A Flat Place: A Memoir (2023) – and I’m so glad I bought it. A Flat Place is an extraordinary memoir, told with honesty, insight, and exactly the right sort of vulnerability.

As Noreen explains the notes at the end, this was initially intended to be solely a book about flat landscapes – whether that be expansive fields she remembers seeing in Lahore, Pakistan, where she spent the first decade and a half of her life, or in Ely, Orkney, Newcastle and other places where Noreen has lived or ventured in search of flatness. But the book quickly became about much more than that. It is about her experiences growing up have given her a longing for these flat spaces, and have left a very difficult legacy – including cPTSD, complex post-traumatic stress disorder. More on that in a bit.

As Noreen is quick to point out, her experiences in childhood are not shared by all Pakistani people, or all Pakistani girls brought up in a Muslim household. Her father didn’t want Noreen or her sisters to leave the house or engage with neighbours. She saw so little of life outside of her English-speaking school that she wasn’t even fluent in Urdu. And while her father wasn’t ferociously violent, she describes with aching exactness what it feels like to grow up in a house of fear and tension. Not always in detail – there are many things that she cannot remember, and has no wish to unearth. There are other things that perhaps she does remember, but deliberately obscures in the telling. But it is enough for us to begin to grasp the long reach throughout her adult life – after she was disowned by her father and came to the UK with her Scottish-born mother, studied English literature and became an academic.

The only life I knew was hot and dirty and crowded, bodies pressed against each other: oil sizzling, loud music on my grandmother’s TV, my uncles arguing. Between fourteen and twenty-five people lived in my house in Lahore at any one time, coming and going. So did, at various times, rabbits, goats, chickens, geese budgies, dogs, cats, turkeys, peacocks, chicks and parrots. My father had his own bedroom; the rest of us – my mother, me and three sisters – lived in another, piling over each, shouting and fighting in hushed voices so as not to wake him while he slept. There was nowhere to run.

Much of A Flat Place is about these childhood experiences, but there is also a great deal about her travels around the UK in search of flatness. Like many people, I am drawn to views with mountains, hills, and variety, but Noreen Masud explains poetically what it is that draws her to flat landscapes – the refuge she can find in them, the sense of identifying with them. Here, she is writing about the fens in Cambridgeshire:

But I knew that, here, there was no right or wrong way to look. I could just be with the landscape, be in it. And because the landscape was the same for miles and miles, I could give it the time it needed. I didn’t have to ‘take it all in’ at once. I could let it seep slowly into me as I walked. I could get to know it, like a dear friend, over a long time, rather the forcing a sudden overwhelming intimacy which couldn’t be sustained.

It is too detailed and thoughtful an exploration to summarise with one quote or paraphrase, but I thought she handled a complex, almost metaphysical element to the memoir with adeptness. Many of her readers won’t be able to connect with her experiences, either in her upbringing or in her adult life, but she bridges that divide beautifully.

Complex PTSD is, I learn, difficult to diagnose – difficult to recognise in oneself, and difficult to convey to others. PTSD usually relates to one, or a few, traumatic experiences and periods. CPTSD is different:

It was particularly difficult to treat, because – like a flat landscape – it didn’t offer a significant landmark, an event, that you could focus on and work with. Complex post-traumatic stress, according to the psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman, is the result of ‘prolonged, repeated trauma’, rather than individual traumatic events. It’s what happens when you’re born into a world, shaped by a world, where there’s no safety, ever. When the people who should take care of you are, instead, scary and unreliable, and when you live years and years without the belief that escape is possible.

Another strand to A Flat Place is Noreen Masud’s responses to the racism that is deeply woven into British life and history – partly the shambolic history of the British role in dividing India and Pakistan, but also the ways in which the experiences of Pakistani people are considered less significant than those of white British people. This comes to a head during the pandemic lockdown, where people became deeply agitated over experiences that they took for granted were acceptable in another country, for another people.

I had to bite my mouth to stop myself from being unkind. Because I knew which children mattered and which didn’t. What children in other countries were expected to endure as standard parts of life – cramped conditions, imprisonment, periods of separation from loved ones – must not be tolerated for British children; unlike their counterparts abroad, they are fragile, precious, capable of infinite sophisticated development.

I’ve only touched the surface of the many themes and accounts that Noreen Masud manages to combine so elegantly and wisely into A Flat Place. Among the most moving, to me, were the sections where her mother asked if they could travel to Orkney together – their time together is shared with such candour, without trying to come to any smooth conclusions about what their relationship has been, is now, or could be.

This is not a misery memoir, nor is it a tale of overcoming adversity and reaching perfection – it is an exploration, and a continuing one. I love memoirs that incorporate unusual lenses for exploration of the self, and flat places is an ambitious one – the ambition more than pays off. A Flat Place is something special.

The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight #ABookADayInMay No.17

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The Premonitions Bureau: A Sunday Times bestseller: Amazon.co.uk: Knight, Sam: 9780571357567: Books

I didn’t know anything about The Premonitions Bureau (2022) by Sam Knight when it turned up in the Audible sale – but the title, the cover, and the unexpected subtitle telling me that it was a true story were enough for me to take a gamble on it.

The story starts with the Aberfan disaster in 1966 – I’m sure you all know about it, but
it’s when a colliery waste tip atop a Welsh hillside suddenly fell down into the valley with devastating effect. 144 people died, including large numbers of pupils in the village school. And several people claimed to have predicted that the tragedy would happen.

‘Claimed’ is perhaps the wrong word, since apparently two of the people who predicted it also died in the disaster – neither of them apparently having any sense that they were having a premonition. One of the children in the school told her mother “I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it.” Another had drawn a picture of people digging at the hillside, with the words ‘The End’.

John Barker, a psychiatrist who ran a mental hospital in an old Victorian asylum in Shropshire, was fascinated by the possibilities in this phenomenon. He had already been deeply interested in unusual psychiatric issues – such as Munchausen syndrome, or the idea that people could literally be scared to death.

Being a scientist, he decided to go about this systematically. He set up the Premonitions Bureau, inviting people to send in any premonitions they had – whether in dreams, visions, or convictions. They got hundreds of replies from all over the place – some trolling them, but others very serious. Few seemed to be particularly specific – more along the lines of ‘something terrible will happen to a plane’ – but each was catalogued carefully. The hope was to be able to present their findings to the Medical Research Council and perhaps, in turn, set up a system to warn people of impending disasters. (Though there was also a debate about whether you could have a premonition of an event that then doesn’t happen – a Catch 22 for any way of using this tool to save lives.)

I had never heard of the Premonitions Bureau, and I did find Barker a likeable, fascinating and curiously impenetrable person. And I found much the same with Knight’s book. It goes on so many tangents, exploring interesting side-roads to the main discussion – often spending large chunks of chapters talking about these other matters in great detail. And some of them are certainly interesting, but by contrast, the bits about the actual bureau seem a bit flimsy. We don’t learn much about the hundreds of contributions or contributors, or what happened when they were right or wrong (though, as an exception, we do get a lot of detail about a train crash that was apparently predicted and which one of the BeeGees survived). It does feel as though there isn’t enough material to give a thoroughly researched book about this bureau – that it is an enthralling and enticing topic which isn’t quite followed up by what we learn about it. The bureau is there throughout, but sometimes as a shadowy thread at the centre of a lot of other topics.

And Knight is careful in not committing either way to whether or not he believes premonitions can happen. There are moments which seem to defeat any scepticism, but not much on probabilities of success or alternative explanations of the ‘accurate’ premonitions.

I did finish The Premonitions Bureau having found it interesting and well-written, but thinking that I might prefer to read a fictional story that could equally well be invented for this eye-catching title. Perhaps truth is stranger than fiction, but I think fiction could have been more satisfying.

Foster by Claire Keegan #ABookADayInMay No.16

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Foster by Claire Keegan | Waterstones

Today’s book is so short that it is almost a short story – 88 pages, or an hour and half as an audiobook (which is how I read it – indeed, since I listen to audiobooks fast, it was a little under an hour). So many people have raved about Foster (2010) in the past couple of years that I couldn’t help downloading it when it was on offer.

This is a thoroughly Irish novella, Irishness seeped through every sentence – whether that be depictions of the County Wexford countryside, the turns of phrase like ‘It was a cottage she lived in’, or the open casket at a funeral that takes place halfway through. It is 1981 and the unnamed narrator (another one!) is a young girl who has been deposited with John and Edna Kinsella. They live on a farm in County Wexford, and she has come from Country Carlow – not knowing exactly why she is there, or for how long, or indeed if she is ever going to go home. Her father leaves with a warning not to fall in the fire, and departs with no kinder word of affection. He has also forgotten to leave any of her clothes – but the Kinsellas have some that she can use, until they can buy her some more.

Keegan’s novella is a masterclass in what is not said. We don’t learn a huge amount about the home that she has left, except that it is busy, crowded and not a particularly kind place to live. The narrator is used to incident. There is no space for rest, for simply being. And even while the Kinsellas’ farm is being productively run, there is peace and there is calm.

And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end – to wake in a wet bed, to make some blunder, some big gaffe, to break something – but each day follows on much like the one before.

There is a twist in the story, though it is one that simply deepens our understanding of character. It isn’t played to jar the reader; the plot is not as important as the people.

This is a beautiful little book, showing in not-many pages the richness of human kindness, the complex simplicity of country life, and the transformation that can take place when love is gently, generously shared.

People who got Stuck into this Book:

“Foster is a sublime novella, a masterclass in the ‘less-is-more’ school of writing – a poignant story, beautifully told.” – Jacqui Wine

“It is a very well written story, subtle and nuanced with a clear focus on the characters. I think I expected more from it, though.” – The Mookse and the Gripes

“Foster is as lyrical as poetry and has the depth of a full-length novel, yet it’s very brevity is what makes it so impressive.” – 746 Books

 

Making Love by Jean-Philippe Toussaint #ABookADayInMay No.15

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I bought Making Love (2002) by the Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint back in 2014, in an edition translated by Linda Coverdale – unusually, and pleasingly, her name even makes the cover. It’s a slim novella at only 114 pages, and I found it beguilingly beautiful… with some reservations. I’ve just learned, from the author’s Wikipedia page, that it’s the first in the ‘cycle of Marie’, of which there are four books so far.

Marie is one of the two main characters in Making Love, the other being our narrator – another unnamed narrator, which has cropped up a few times in May. It is set over the course of a few days in Japan, in Tokyo and Kyoto, and we are told from the outset that this trip is the end of their relationship. It hasn’t been planned as a final trip to say farewell to their love – and it is something the narrator slowly realises, with the sense of something inevitable.

That point comes at the end of this paragraph, though the reason I wanted to quote it is as example of Toussaint’s beautiful, beautiful writing. So much of Making Love is suffused with this sort of gorgeous, strangely elegiac writing. Whether the weather, the glowing lights of Tokyo, or simply the sight of a hotel room, Toussaint (and Coverdale) write prose like poetry – but very readable poetry, that doesn’t obstruct the sense:

From where we sat in the restaurant, the wooden window frame presented only a fragmented and incoherent street scene, giving onto a shadowy building with mysterious electric wires and a column of light made up of seven or eight superimposed illuminated signs rising vertically along the façade to announce the presence of bars on every floor. I watched the snow falling silently in the street, light and impalpable, clinging to neon signs, the contours of paper lanterns, car roofs, and the glass eyelets anchoring the wires of telephone poles. When the flakes crossed the bright zone of a street lamp, they whirled an instant in the light like a cloud of powdered sugar puffed aloft by an invisible divine breath, and that snow seemed to me an image of the passage of time, and then, in the immense helplessness I felt at being unable to keep time from passing, I had the presentiment that the end of the night would mean the end of our love.

Those reservations I mentioned earlier? I think the only thing holding me back from relishing every page of Making Love is clued in the title – there is a seamy side to the novella. Along the way, even as they approach the end of the relationship, the couple make love on several occasions – and I don’t object to that being in the novella. But the words and sentences used to describe those moments lose all gentleness. They tone becomes quite sordid and, dare I say, anatomical. It is at odds with the feel of the rest of the prose, in a way that doesn’t feel effective so much as inelegant.

I was more intrigued by the suspenseful subplot of Making Love – the little vial of acid that the narrator has packed with him on this trip, keeping it hidden in his washbag. He returns to it often throughout, whether in action or thought, and the reader can’t help thinking of it as a Chekhov’s gun – why has he brought it, and what will happen with it, if anything? Interestingly, this additional element to the story doesn’t feel at all jarring, even though it could have done. This part Toussaint managed to incorporate elegantly.

So, I was impressed enough by the writing that I will probably seek out more by Toussaint – and if the Marie cycle is chronological, it will be interesting to see what happens after the end of this relationship.

The Forensic Records Society by Magnus Mills #ABookADayInMay No.14

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The Forensic Records Society: Amazon.co.uk: 9781408878378: Books

I love Magnus Mills and have been reading him for years, and have a few on the shelves that I thought would be likely to come up in my May reading. The Forensic Records Society (2017) was a gift last year from my friend Mel, who also introduced me to Mills’ writing in the first place.

The narrator (I think unnamed, though all the men’s names in this book are so bland as to be deliberately forgettable) is chatting one night with his friend James. They are listening to a record that they enjoy but is no longer in the limelight, and decide that probably nobody else in the world is listening to it – one thing leads to another, and they come to a decision about bringing together record-lovers. Or, at least, James has the idea:

“We could form a society for the express purpose of listening to records closely and in detail, forensically if you like, without any interruption or distraction. There would be regular gatherings, and membership would depend on some kind of test to make sure people are genuinely interested.”

“You mean a code of conduct?”

“Certainly,” said James. “We don’t want any charlatans.”

They decide to hold the inaugural meeting in the backroom of the pub. Landlord George, affable and largely unquestioning, is happy for them to hold it there rent-free for a trial period. The only rules of the Forensic Records Society are to turn up on time, bring three records (not LPs) and then listen to them in turn, without comment or judgement.

The group is small at first – and one man, in a long leather coat, is turned away because he arrives a few minutes late. James is firm on that front. The others listen to their records, not making comments or judgements, though one of the men (Chris) often quotes one of the lines from a song that seems to summarise it. Another (Mike) is fixated upon how long each record is, and considers three minutes the perfect length – almost as though it were a holy grail. Curiously, when they leave the room, more time has passed than the number of records played would allow for.

There are a few things that threaten this small group of like-minded men. One is James’s insistence on rules – and using the narrator as a lackey to enforce them, including shutting out the barmaid one evening. The other is the rival groups that start up.

The first is formed by that rejected man in the leather coat – a Confessional Records Society, where people go one at a time to play a record and make a confession. Most seem to leave in tears of joy, though the Forensic Records Society’s attempts to infiltrate don’t go to plan. But that’s not the final rival group that emerges in this ordinary pub, much to the delight of landlord George with his eye on the profit margin.

Along the way, Mills incorporates many names of records – most of which I hadn’t heard of, though there is a playlist you can use alongside. The first edition of The Forensic Records Society (pictured above) even came in the shape of a record, though my paperback is a little more plebian. The text suggests that there is a wide range of styles, artists, and eras featured, though looking through the playlist it definitely leans towards the taste of middle-aged men – which certainly fits the characters.

As so often with Mills, there is a lurking sense of menace throughout. He is so careful never to overstate anything, and it’s the reader who brings all that foreboding to the novel. It’s just about a bunch of blokes listening to records – on the surface. But you can’t help think that it’s about something else.

There are always analogies and parallels floating about when you’re reading Mills – is it all about the October Revolution, as one reviewer suggests? Or is it about religious schisms? Or cults? Mills is too clever to ever let you pin anything down. He is a master of short, sharp dialogue that doesn’t say much. But he simply invests the everyday with an uneasiness that makes each of his novels feel quite powerfully dark – unsettling in the best possible way.

It’s always a discomforting pleasure to spend time with Mills, and there is nobody like him.

Palladian by Elizabeth Taylor #ABookADayInMay No.13

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A short review as I’m just off to a Eurovision party!

I think Palladian (1946) might be my final Elizabeth Taylor novel (though, now I write that, unsure I’ve read In A Summer Season) – it was one of her first and, as the Wikipedia page tersely notes, most clearly shows the influence of Jane Austen.

That’s evident from the name of the heroine onwards: Miss Dashwood (Cassandra) is a young woman whose parents have both died, and who goes off to be a governess at Cropthorne Manor. Governesses in the mid-1940s are not quite what they were in the 19th-century, of course, and she is part of the eccentric family quite quickly.

Who is there? Precocious young Sophy, who will be Cassandra’s pupil and who speaks of missing her mother, though she died in childbirth. There is Sophy’s father, Marion (!) Vanbrugh who is a charming, slightly selfish widower. His cousin Margaret is there, a woman keen to shock others, particularly her mother Aunt Tinty – the housekeeper, of sorts, who is plagued by any number of anxieties. And finally Margaret’s brother Tom, who drinks voraciously and with occasional melancholy. Between them, they feud and make up, they reveal secrets and conceal others, they make life hard for each other for both good and bad reasons. Plenty of incidents happen, but it is the sprawling dynamic between these well-drawn, infuriating and fascinating characters that makes Palladian interesting.

The plot does lean a little towards melodrama, and perhaps the influence of Northanger Abbey is as present as any other of Austen’s novels. But what makes this novel so quintessentially Elizabeth Taylor is her brilliant prose. There are lovely scenes of nature, and then there will be a slyness that undercuts every pose the characters try to adopt. Not many other authors would write ‘Mrs Turner smoothed – or hoped to smooth – her skirt’, or ‘”She has a heart of gold,” she added unkindly’. It was those moments that made this novel most special to me. Another example:

“Did you do all your cooking on it?” She looked at Cassandra with a new expression on her face, of wonderment, perhaps, or respect.

“Well, after my mother died, my father and I seemed to live on bread-and-butter.”

The look faded.

I don’t think this is among Elizabeth Taylor’s very best novels, and I will admit that a lot of the very-good-but-quite-similar ones have merged in my mind, and this will join them. But as I re-read her works, I’m sure they will each become more distinct – and now that I’m getting to the end of my Taylor shelf, it won’t be long before re-reading starts.

Gerald: A Portrait by Daphne du Maurier #ABookADayInMay No.12

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I usually try to join in Ali’s Daphne du Maurier Reading Week, though I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it work with finishing a book a day in May, since none of the candidates on my shelves were very short. Then I had a brainwave – I could finish an audiobook one day in the car, and spread reading a Daphne du Maurier out over two days.

So, which to choose? Eventually I alighted upon Gerald, Daphne du Maurier’s biography of her father – published in 1934, the year that Gerald du Maurier died. Daphne du Maurier was only 27 – she’d published three novels, but none of them are the ones that would make her name as a writer of fiction. According to the not-too-subtle cover of my 1950 reprint, it was apparently Gerald that initially brought her fame as a writer.

And it really is a marvellous book. It has been sitting on my shelves for a very long time and I had never been particularly tempted by it, but it is an exceptionally good read. It is not a biography in any traditional sense of the word – certainly she does not treat Gerald du Maurier with any criticism, which is unsurprising from a grieving daughter. But this is not even a hagiography – it is a novel, based heavily on fact, in which Gerald is the flawless hero. And because it is a fantasy of a person, it doesn’t matter that we only see one side. There is something in the tone that goes even past novel. It is a fairy tale of a person’s life, and enveloping in that way that only a fairy tale can be.

Daphne du Maurier starts even before Gerald is born, and we see scenes of their childhood – anecdotes that were clearly passed down through the generations are turned into stories told by an omniscient narrator. This continues as Gerald gets older – his unsuccessful engagements and his eventual courtship with Muriel (‘Mo’) are shown with a novelist’s detail. Woven into the narrative are letters that may well have been preserved, but they sit alongside full conversations that du Maurier must have made up. Here, she pictures her only parents in their early days of romance (where ‘Mummie’ is Daphne du Maurier’s grandmother):

Up to the present they had been in rooms, and during the early part of the summer had taken a cottage at Walton-on-Thames, which was a happy refuge from the from the hot weather. “When I’m not picking green-fly off rose heads, I’m picking the black fly off dwarf beans,” Gerald gravely wrote to Mummie. “Everything is doing very well except Japanese iris and parsley. I haven’t been outside the estate yet, but Muriel manages both indoor and outdoor servants with marvellous tact, and even the stable-boys worship here.” (The cottage really had about three rooms, and a tiny square of garden.) Mummie nodded her head an smiled. Darling Gerald was so funny. And it was a wonderful thing to see him happy like this.

Dear Muriel was obviously taking great care of him. She had not seen him looking so well for years. He had got quite brown, too, not that horrid washed-out colour she was used to. Her never took his eyes off Muriel.

The bulk of Gerald, though, is about his acting and theatre producing career. I had always thought of him as primarily a theatre manager, and hadn’t realised how much he had acted – and how influential he had been in this world. But Daphne du Maurier takes us through his ascent to fame, and then his triumphs and failures, each considered as though she had seen the play in question – even when that would be impossible. His big break-through was playing a villain in Raffles in 1906.

And yet there were those who believed that because Gerald did not hump his back, cover his face with hair, wear tights, and speak blank verse, he was therefore no actor. How many times, then and afterwards, did people exclaim, “But du Maurier, he does not act; he is always himself.” To act is to portray an emotion; to show the feelings aroused by some sensation, whether joyous or traffic; to make the man in the audience feel, either uncomfortably or happily, “That might have been me.” This is what Gerald, who started the so-called naturalistic school of acting, tried to do.

There are some famous names in du Maurier’s milieu, and it’s entertaining to read about how J.M. Barrie’s plays went over – and, indeed, how the adaptation of Trilby by George du Maurier (Gerald’s father) became such a sensation. Other of the plays mentioned were already fading from popularity by 1934, and have disappeared altogether now. Similarly, some actors mentioned would still ring bells – Gracie Fields, Gladys Cooper, Irene Vanbrugh, Celia Johnson – while others are no loner discussed. But to be still well-known a century and more later is quite the feat!

I love anything about the theatre, fact or fiction, so lapped up all of this. The brief interlude when Gerald becomes a soldier in the First World War is, indeed, brief. Partly because he didn’t enlist until 1918 and never left England, but also because it doesn’t seem like part of the life that Daphne du Maurier wants to focus on. For her, and for her implied reader, Gerald is a brilliant theatre impresario – and she also wants to show the great man at home. This does mean we get slightly curious, but still delightful, sections where Daphne du Maurier refers to herself in the third person:

As they grew from babies into children, and occasionally the little nursery storms came to his ears, he would settle disputes in strange, amusing ways, turning a scolding into a game. There was the famous time when Daphne pulled Angela’s hair and trod on her face, Angela replying with her peculiar death-grip like a bear’s hug. The joint shrieks of rage reaching Gerald in the drawing-room, he had them brought downstairs, and, dressing up as a judge, staged a court of law with the children as prisoners at the bar and witnesses in one. It lasted until past bedtime, and, when the nurse came to fetch them, the original quarrel had been long forgotten.

These sweet stories are enjoyable fluff – but there is a definite poignancy as she writes about her father when she is a bit older. A tell-all memoir wouldn’t reach the same level of emotion as this:

There is, alas, a world of difference between the girl of eighteen and the man of fifty, especially when they are father and daughter. The one is resentful of the other. The girl mocks at experience and detests the voice of authority; the man yearns for companionship and does not know how to attain it. They stand side by side, with the barrier of years between them, and both are too shy to break it down; both are too diffident, too self-conscious. They chant about superficialities, and avoid each other’s eyes, while all the time they are aware that the moments are passing, and the years will not bring them nearer to one another. Gerald was hungry for companionship; he longed for Angela and Daphne to tell him everything, to discuss their friends, to solve their problems, to share their troubles; but the very quality of his emotion made them shy/ They could not admit him into their confidence, and they drew back like snails into their shells.

It was not only Gerald’s tragedy. It is the tragedy of every father and every daughter since the world began.

What really sets the book apart, alongside Daphne du Maurier’s unique perspective, is her exceptional writing. That’s one of many things that make it feel more like novel than biography. From an objective biographer, these sorts of passages might be struck out as purple prose – in the world that Daphne du Maurier has created for us to enter, they are beautiful:

Gerald belonged to Wyndham’s; he was as much a part of it as the boards, the curtain, the heavy swing door, the row of stalls shrouded in their white and grimy covers, the cat in the dress circle, the backcloth and the false movable walls that were not walls, the dust in the passages, the intimate, indescribable, musty, fusty smell that was the back of the stage and the dressing-rooms and the front of the house in one.

Much of his personality is embedded in those walls. His laughter is still in the passage, his footstep on the stairs, and his voice calling for Tommy Lovell when the curtain falls. For all their passing away and the coming of other sounds – new voices, new laughter, other men and other memories – something of himself remains for ever amidst the dust and silence of that theatre; a breath, a whisper, the echo of a song.

I don’t know if anybody else has written a biography of Gerald du Maurier. There was definitely a vogue for a while of writing enormous biographies that didn’t spare the subject, and the more invasive and unpleasant the more they were considered to be authentic. The tide, thankfully, seems to have turned a bit. Since it is impossible to entirely know a person through a book anyway, I would rather we get this subjective, overly generous, loving portrait than anything more callous. Gerald is a wonderful book by a sublime storyteller.